A Short History of the War on Christmas

Henry Ford was an avid proponent of the idea that someone—or more precisely, some group—was waging a war on Christmas. “Last Christmas most people had a hard time finding Christmas cards that indicated in any way that Christmas commemorated Someone's Birth,” according to The International Jew: The World's Foremost Problem, a widely distributed set of anti-Semitic articles published in the automobile magnate’s newsweekly during the 1920s. “People sometimes ask why 3,000,000 Jews can control the affairs of 100,000,000 Americans. In the same way that ten Jewish students can abolish the mention of Christmas and Easter out of schools containing 3,000 Christian pupils.”

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In 1959, it was the far-right John Birch Society that published a pamphlet alerting the nation to an "assault on Christmas" carried out by "UN fanatics...What they now want to put over on the American people is simply this: Department stores throughout the country are to utilize UN symbols and emblems as Christmas decorations.”

Today’s War Over Christmas still revolves around department stores, and focuses on the rise of “Happy Holidays” and “Holiday Trees.” And it remains alert to an internal enemy poised to stab America in the back. But like everything else, the War Over Christmas has become tarted up, 24-houred and Twitterized—even as it has grown drearily routine, an annual pageant in which culture warriors line the trenches and, like mechanical toy soldiers in a shopping-mall display, fix bayonets and wage the same battle all over again.

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The modern American War on Christmas began “pretty much 10 years ago,” Fox News host Bill O’Reilly recalled earlier this month in a conversation with Sarah Palin (the former would-be veep was promoting her new book, Good Tidings and Great Joy: Protecting the Heart of Christmas). It was sparked in part, he said, by “major corporations [that] ordered their employees not to say ‘Merry Christmas.’”

He got the date slightly wrong. It was actually nine years ago, almost to the day, on Dec. 7th, 2004, that The O'Reilly Factor first aired a segment on “Christmas Under Siege” and, in so doing, appears to have launched The War Over Christmas as we know it.

“All over the country, Christmas is taking flak,” O’Reilly told viewers, deploying a fittingly martial metaphor. “In Denver this past weekend, no religious floats were permitted in the holiday parade there. In New York City, Mayor Bloomberg unveiled the ‘holiday tree,’ and no Christian Christmas symbols are allowed in the public schools. Federated Department Stores—that’s Macy’s—have done away with the Christmas greeting ‘Merry Christmas.’”

This was three years after the Sept. 11 attacks, two years after Fox had overtaken CNN to become the nation’s most-watched cable news channel, 20 months since the United States invaded Iraq, and one year after George W. Bush defeated John Kerry after a campaign focused so intensely on gay marriage that it is now hard to comprehend. The newest round of the culture wars was in full swing.

"The Christmas War is symbiotic, promoting a wholesome effect on ratings and web traffic alike," writes Denvir. "Liberals mock conservatives, and conservatives then hold up the liberal ridicule."

One happy warrior was Wall Street Journal columnist Peggy Noonan, who wrote in December 2003 that her snooty Upper East Side neighbors’ distaste for her Virgin Mary figurine was proof that “the meaning and actuality of 9/11 ... has receded.” It was a moment when conservative ascendancy had reached new heights, but also its outer limits. Liberals (or, in O’Reilly's language, “secular progressives”) were at the gate, and ready to jump the walls.

“Secular progressives realize,” O'Reilly continued, “that America as it is now will never approve of gay marriage, partial birth abortion, euthanasia, legalized drugs, income redistribution through taxation and many other progressive visions because of religious opposition. But if the secularists can destroy religion in the public arena, the brave new progressive world is a possibility. That’s what happened in Canada.”

Days later, the conservative commentator Pat Buchanan declared curbs on Christmas to be “hate crimes against Christianity.”

For many such culture warriors, a Bible-believing (often white and English-speaking) America is under siege—and Christmas is a hill worth dying on. “The Christians are coming to retake their place in the public square, and the most natural battleground in this war is Christmas," John Gibson, then a Fox News host, wrote in his 2005 book The War on Christmas: How the Liberal Plot to Ban the Sacred Christian Holiday Is Worse Than You Thought.

By then, the War on Christmas had become an All-American staple of the 24-hour news cycle, a gift to busy news producers trying to fill the airwaves, as O'Reilly’s message carried into the 2005 holiday season. Political life began to imitate TV art. Rev. Jerry Falwell's Liberty Counsel and the Alliance Defense Fund pledged to fight restrictions on Christmas good will, and the American Family Association called for a boycott of Target because, it was alleged, the company did not use the word “Christmas” in advertisements. (Target told reporters there was "no trend or intent to ban the use of Christmas in our holiday advertising and marketing.")

The left was disturbed, but perhaps even more amused: Was there anything that made conservatives look more like ignorant and provincial hicks?

On Dec. 7, 2005, the Daily Show aired its first segment of what would soon become a War-On-Christmas-bloopers franchise.

The Christmas War is symbiotic, producing a wholesome effect on ratings and web traffic alike: Liberals mock conservatives, and conservatives then hold up the liberal ridicule—be it Stewart or columnist Gail Collins (whom O’Reilly recently dismissed as “this woman in the New York Times ... I forget her name")—as proof of War on Christmas “denial.”

Daniel Denvir is staff writer at Philadelphia City Paper. Follow him at Twitter @DanielDenvir.